Thursday, June 21, 2012

In Praise of Pina

In spite of the company's yearly season at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music (BAM), Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Tanztheater was largely ignored by the
US dance community. Every time I tried to bring her name up in conversation I
was met with uncomprehending stares. Here we talk Balanchine, Mark Morris and
Martha Graham.

However Pina Bausch has developed a large following in Europe
and Asia during hertwenty-five
years of tenure in Wuppertal. In May 2008 she was diagnosed with lung cancer
and died a month later. Many of her works have been available as cult classics
on You Tube and are still performed by her company in extensive international
tours.

My first contact with Pina's work was at the beginning of
Almodovar's film "Talk to her". Two men sit side by side in a theater
watching a performance of "Café
Müller", a parable of
longing, search and disappointment, that brings both to tears and into closer
acquaintance. The film ends with another Pina piece, "Botafogo", a
nostalgic and sensual danzón.

Pina Bausch has often seen her performances quoted and included
in films. In 2009, at the Cinemathèque
Française I watched a two
hour draft of a film by Jérome
Cassou, a French filmmaker who had worked with her, mingling his steadycam with
her dancers during performances at the Théatre
du Chatelet. I was dazzled by the unedited sequences that Cassou hoped would
open him to authoring a biopic or anthological film on her life. It was not to
be; Wim Wenders, her compatriot, has finally produced a magnificent remembrance
of what she accomplished, a homage titled "Pina", nominated at the
84th Academy Awards for best live documentary.

Pina is not identifiable with any of the well-known ballet
schools in use in the USA. She stems directly from the German Expressionist
school, with flavors taken from Martha Graham. Born in 1940, she studied under
Joost, a survivor of the Weimar era, and landed at age 19 in New York, where
she studied at the Juilliard School, and danced with the Metropolitan Opera
Ballet and the Paul Taylor Company. Those two years, she has said, made her
free.

She then returned to Germany, to study under Günther Folkwang. She started to
choreograph for him and later, after his death, formed the Folkwang Ballet. In
1973 she went on to form her own company, the Tanztheater, in Wuppertal, a
heavily industrial city in the metallurgical Ruhr basin, explicitly moving away
from the denomination "ballet". "Tanztheater" literally
means "theater of dance", giving her the freedom to express her
distance from traditional ballet.

In the twenty-five years of her tenure she has produced some
thirty works, and gathered around her a devoted body of dancers from around the
world. Many of them have been with her for most of their careers, and she has
always found material in people of all ages. Wim Wenders centers his just
opened film around some of them, young and old, to illustrate her working
style. She looks for the inner resources of her dancers to produce the deeper
landscape that the dance aims to express. Wenders includes an old clip of hers,
explaining why she will not work with words "...they are only symbols,
stand-ins foremotions."Her most frequent admonition to the people
around her is to keep on looking for that deep-felt motivation.

The interviewed dancers recognize Pina's talent in unleashing
their own potential, to examine and understand themselves, to bring out the
most recondite feelings in them, and to shape that material into powerful
messages of humanity. An Argentinian dancer recalls the day when Pina asked him
to come up with a movement expressing joy. When he did so, she developed around
it a whole sequence for the ensemble.

Pina addresses human longings, loneliness, its vices and
sequels, and the drives and aspirations of men and women in their isolation.

She is known for bringing onto the stage natural elements,
water, peat, rocks, flowers and shape the dance around them. One of her best
known works, "Vollmond" (Full moon), is centered around a huge,
metallic-grey boulder, sitting in a pool of water, in which the dancers swim,
slither, pursueeach other, splash
and cavort throwing elegant semicircular silver plumes of water.

Her most dramatic work, to Stravinsky's "Rite of
Spring", is danced on a stage covered with dirt. A sacrificial maiden is
chosen by the tribe to be offered to the gods. Men do the choosing from a tight
cluster of terrified girls, dancing in unison in short and staccato gestures,
in their togetherness, visual echoes of Rodin's "Citizens of Calais"
and Käthe Kollwitz's
workers and peasants, towards submission and death.

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Richard Romano has been involved with the Saratoga Film Forum since 2001. As well as being on the Board of Directors, he writes and produces the Film Forum's regular newsletter and serves as Webmaster for saratogafilmforum.org.